The Holocaust was an inconceivable historical event, which forever robbed Western culture of its innocence. As civilized human beings, we fail to understand how events of such horror could have taken place, and how an idea so inhumanly warped could have spread like wildfire through an entire continent, instigating the systematic annihilation of millions of Jews.
This free online course was produced jointly by Tel Aviv University and Yad Vashem – the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. This course is the second of the two courses and covers three themes in its three weeks:
Week 1: The Final Solution
We’ll look at the cultural and mental processes that paved the way to the comprehensive and systematic mass murder of Jews in Europe – that is, the Final Solution. As part of this hard lesson we will discuss the various characteristics of the murder sites and death camps, and reveal selected aspects of the horror that occurred in them.
Week 2: Jewish and Non-Jewish Responses to the Holocaust
We will try to explore questions regarding knowledge about the application of the Final Solution, as well as a variety of responses and annihilation of victims, local populations and perpetrators.
Week 3: The End of the War
We will dedicate this lesson to the events that occurred in the last years of the Holocaust, as well as questions of memory, commemoration and future research.
We strongly recommend that you register for "The Holocaust - An Introduction (I): Nazi Germany: Ideology, The Jews and the World" as well. Taking both parts of the course would enable you to obtain a fuller and more comprehensive knowledge about The Holocaust.
This online course is offered in an innovative, multi-level format, comprising:
Comprehensive lectures by leading researchers from Tel Aviv University and Yad Vashem.
A wealth of voices and viewpoints presented by guest lecturers
Numerous documents, photos, testimonies and works of art from the time of the Holocaust.
Novel learning experience: Crowdsourcing – involving the learners themselves in the act of collecting and shaping information, via unique, exciting online assignments.

從本節課中

The Final Solution and the Drive for Eliminating All Jews and All Perceived Jewish "Influences"

This lesson will be devoted to the cultural and mental processes which paved the way to the comprehensive and systematic mass murder of Jews. We will deal with the specific decision-making process regarding the murder of the entire European Jewry, the implementation of the initial murder, the broadening circle of killing, and the early Jewish reactions to the "Final Solution".

與講師見面

Professor Havi Dreifuss, PhD

ProfessorHavi Dreifuss is a historian of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe; senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish History at TAU; heads the Center for Research of Holocaust History in Poland, Yad Vashem.

Dr Na'ama Bela Shik, PhD

Director, Educational Technology Department, The International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad VashemThe International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem

[MUSIC]

Hello.

On June 22nd, 1941, Nazi Germany attacked its former ally,

the USSR, launching a vicious war against Soviet Russia.

This campaign also marked the beginning of the final solution.

German army forces were followed by four battalion sized task force of SS units,

Einsatzgruppen, ordered to clean the occupied territories of Soviet commissars,

Jews in the State and Party Apparatus, and other threatening agencies.

Thousands of Russian commissars were executed, but

generally speaking, the German forces tried to avoid this order.

They felt that it opposed the laws of war.

Yet regarding the Jews, the order was fulfilled and even expanded.

Hundreds and thousands of Jews, first men, later women and children as well,

were assembled, taken to forests or other locations, and shot to death.

Brest, a city with 25,000 Jews was captured on the 22nd of June,

the very first day of the attack.

Immediately dozens of Jewish men were killed, and

a week later 5,000 more men were murdered in shooting pits.

In this short time, more than a fifth of the Jewish community and

almost all its young men were killed.

In Bialystok about 7,000 Jews were killed within the first two weeks.

In Kamenets Podolsk, Ukraine, first occupied by forces, and

transferred to the German hands in July, more than 28,000 Jews,

among them about 10,000 Jews deported from Hungary, and were concentrated.

Between the 26th and the 29th of August, 1941,

23,600 of them were killed, including most of the refugees.

And in Kiev, which the German forces reached in the mid September 1941,

33,771 Jews were murdered on the 29th and

30th of the month in the infamous nearby valley of Babi Yar.

Due to time it took the German forces to reach the city, about 100,000

former Jewish citizens managed to flee with the retreating Russian troops.

This data, and much more, can be shown is truly terrifying, yet

I would like to point out a few important insights regarding those murderous acts.

First, as we advance to the East, more and more Jews managed to flee.

In the most Western territories, almost none had an opportunity to do so.

Second, many of those murders were assisted by local forces, and

in some places, especially Lithuania and Ukraine,

the German occupations unleashed bloody progroms, rape and terrible atrocities

committed by the local population claiming the lives of thousands of Jews.

Sometimes, the German forces themselves were shocked by this brutality and

stopped it, only in order to kill the Jews in a much more civilized way,

as if killing could ever be civilized.

Third, not only the SS and local forces committed those crimes.

German army units as well as many other police forces

took an active part in those murders.

In 1941, the Wehrmacht was very different than the one we discussed regarding

the 1939 reality and was fully enlisted in this vicious ideological war.

An example can be taken from an order

given by General Field Marshall Walther von Richenau, a high ranking army officer,

to use troops in the beginning of October 1941.

The most essential aim of war against the Jewish-Bolshevistic

system is a complete destruction of their means of power and

the elimination of the Asiatic influence from the European culture.

In this connection,

the troops are facing tasks which exceed the one-sided routine of soldiering.

The soldier in the Eastern territories is not merely a fighter according to

the rules of the art of war, but also a bearer of ruthless national ideology and

the avenger of beastialities which have been inflicted upon Germany and

racially related nations.

This is the only way to fulfill our historic task to liberate the German

people once and for all from the Asiatic-Jewish danger.

Above other things, this document exposed how Nazi Germany cruelty was

attributed to its victims and was used to justify its own boundless atrocities.

In 1941 The Wehrmacht became Hitler's army, to borrow the name of the most

recommended book by Omer Bartov which showed clearly, among other things,

the integration of the Wehrmacht into Nazi Party genocidal ideology.

But returning to the murder track,

of the four Einsatzgruppen units assisted by police battalions, army units and

tens and thousands of locals, a few more things should be said.

Today we asses that more than two million Jews were killed in shooting pits,

meaning that the story of the Holocaust is not only of Death Camps, soon to be

described, but also of this most efficient yet primitive way of killing.

Second, during the first weeks of the killing spree, mainly men were murdered.

True, in some cases the whole community was annihilated.

In others as it [FOREIGN], all adults were killed, and

we cannot go into the tragedy of the children left alone until their murder.

The killings were implemented in a variety of ways.

It was only toward the mid-August 1941 that some general

commands were given regarding the practical unification of the killing acts.

No less important, it is to emphasize that despite all atrocities,

the killing of the Einsatzgruppen and

their assistants were limited to the east, the newly occupied territories.

While Jews in the western Europe and even Poland continued to live

in dire conditions, but were still not killed in masses.

Thus, at this point of the summer of 1941,

we can see the resolution of the mass murder of Jews in the Soviet Union.

Only the next few months will this deadly decision be expanded

to all of European Jews.

In September 1941, some important developments occurred.

Initial planning of what would become Chelmno and Belzec death camp and the first

experiment of killing inmates by gas was done in Auschwitz, mainly on Soviet POWs.

Some leading researchers in the field concluded that during July,

August and September of 1941,

in the result of Hitler's euphoria of the rapid advance of his troops to the east,

Hitler expanded the murders to the include all European Jewry.

The fact that during the week of the 7th thru the 13th of September

1941 Hitler's famous speech of January 30th, 1939 discussed in

our first meeting, which predicted and promised the total removal of the Jews

was chosen as a proverb of the weak, strengthened this opinion.

And more can be read in Christopher Browning's book,

The Origins of the Final Solution.

Other scholars argue that the decision was made only in December 1941,

adding another step in the development of the final solution.

They say Chelmno and Belzec is local tutorial initiatives of devoted

Nazis who felt frustrated that while Jews were being massacred in the east,

nothing is being done with their Jews, and

place the gassing in Auschwitz in a different context.

They said the victims with Soviet POWs and not Jews.

According to this view, only in mid December 1941 and

following United States joining the war, did Hitler feel

that his promise to liberate the world of the Jews should be fulfilled.

This way or that, researchers agree that during the second half of 1941,

the decision of total murder of the Jews was taken.

And what about the well known Wannsee Conference which took

place in Berlin on the 20th of January, 1942.

Well today we know this was not where the final solution was decided, but an attempt

by Heydrich to take the lead in the task of the mass murder of all European Jews.

Many sources which in the past were valued as key documents are placed today

in a more complicated context.

Let's take an example,

Goering's letter to Heydrich regarding the final solution dated July 31,

1941, which on the first reading, looks as an authorization for the Final Solution.

I hereby charge you to carry out preparations as regards organizational,

financial, and material matters for a total solution [Gesamtlosung] of

the Jewish question in all the territories of Europe under German occupation.

I charge you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan

of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for

carrying out the desired final solution (Endlosung) of the Jewish question.

Isn't this the smoking gun looked for by so many?

Well, actually not.

A closer look at this document, and other documents signed by Goering

implies that the document is not really what it seems at first glance.

Look at the letterhead.

Is this how a formal letter, of great value,

should leave the desk of one of the highest ranking Nazis?

Today we know this document was composed by Heydrich,

typed in his office and signed by Goering at Heydrich's request,

enabling Heydrich to take control over what he saw

as Nazi Germany's most important task, the destruction of the Jewish people.

The same can be said regarding the Wannsee Conference.

True, its minutes expose the magnitude of Heydrich's aspiration.

The old Reich still was over 130 thousand Jews.

Estonia Judenfrei, free of Jews, after the mass shootings.

England, Ireland,

Albania was only 200 Jews, a handful compared to other places, and so on.

Yet, when the Wannsee Conference took place, hundreds of thousands of Jews

had already been killed in shooting pits, the first death camp Chelmno was already

operating, and the death camp at Belzec was by now under construction.

The decision was already made during the second half of 1941,

September or December.

Today we understand that the final solution was a result

of a few different decisions.

First, the mass murder of the Jews in the Soviet Russia,

only later to be applied to others.

Moreover, the involvement of grass roots power is well agreed among researchers.

As is the expansion of the command to shoot Jews in Soviet states,

party apparatus, to the total annihilation of the all the Jewish communities in July,

August 1941, and maybe even the very first initiatives of Chelmno and Belzec.

And at the same time,

scholars also emphasize the very apparent leading powers from above.

Grassroots and leading powers fed each other and acted together in

an ongoing process of escalation which brought this to six million Jews.